


Pavor Nocturnus

by AdmiralGodunov



Category: Zero | Project Zero | Fatal Frame Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 17:41:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1437049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdmiralGodunov/pseuds/AdmiralGodunov
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sleeping is as close to death as you can recover from.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pavor Nocturnus

**Author's Note:**

> (As though they never died at all, but merely live with the crippling visions of themselves as wandering spirits...)

The fear of Kirie's dreams carries over into the real world. She dreams of a dank pit in the earth, of a sacrificial table, and of a device she'd never seen before, but could only imagine it was used for torture.

What she does know are times she'd be on that cursed table, her limbs tied up, and then they'd be stretching, and pulling, and she'd fight and scream but she couldn't move. Then, suddenly, the dream would fade, and her eyes would snap open, but her body was trapped. Her mind would race, but she couldn't move as the sleep paralysis had her in its thrall. She would try to fight, try to scream, but though her eyes could see - her room, the covers over her window - every so often instead she could see the priests, and they always looked like her family at their shrine out in the country - she could not move, could hardly breathe. She tried to move away from the shrine, to seek solace from the dreams...

But they never end. And just when she's sure the ropes are going to pull and her body is going to be ripped apart, when she is sure the reason she can't move or breathe is because of ropes around her wrists, her throat, she feels the familiar tingle that shoots from head to toe and she's up, slowly, sluggishly at first as her sleepy body catches up to her mind, then out of her futon and running from her room, from the dreams, from the idea that she'd be sacrificed to ropes and for what?

She never knows what it is she's being sacrificed to. All she knows is the feeling of something pulsing and evil and dark clawing at her back as she presses backwards against it, as though trying to keep it in.

 

* * *

 

Sae's dreams are visions of violence. She dreams of a hole in the earth that swallows people up and sends them straight to Hell. No Enma to weigh sins against virtues and give fair judgment, no second chances. She dreams of madness, of laughing so hard at a joke she doesn't understand that she can feel the pain in her sides, of a sorrow so great that it makes her cry until she's sure her eyes are pouring blood instead of tears. She dreams of killing; people who are strangers, people who look familiar, of blood gushing - the louder she makes them scream, the better chance the sound will reach her sister, that her sister will return to her. The more they scream, the more it makes her laugh. The more it makes her laugh, the more she makes them scream.

When she wakes, she turns onto her stomach because it aches. She cries so hard it sounds like she's giggling, and half the time it makes her dry heave. The worst part about the dreams is not that she is killing so many people, and gleefully, even if the laughter isn't real. The worst part is the longing she has for her sister, and how vividly the dreams remind her of this fact. She's nothing but a half a person - a butterfly with one wing ripped messily off - without her sister. But it was her fault her sister is gone. It's still her fault. She thought they could get away together. She thought they could move on with their lives from the people that didn't understand them, understand their relationship. They were going to run away to the big city; Tokyo or Kyoto, Osaka or elsewhere, somewhere they could blend into the crowds and no one would ever question their closeness.

She swears every time she didn't push Yae off that cliff - Yae fell when trying to save _her_ from falling.

 

* * *

 

Reika's dreams are sad. Permeating, aching, building sadness, guilt that mounts and mounts throughout the night. It starts with a death that is entirely her fault, and she knows it, and ends with many more. She can never remember all the names or faces, but every night, she swears she sees another one or two fall. She runs after the others in the shrine, but they run away screaming, as though she's some terrible monster that's trying to kill them, when all she wants to do is help. All she wants is to take their pain away. Some part of her knows that it's her fault anyway, that she's the reason they're here in the first place. She'd called them here.

The dreams are always in the shrine where she grew up - she, a dirty little orphan, with an overbearingly strict foster family. But it had been her home, the only place she'd ever known, nestled so deep in the mountains it was snowed in for half the winter.

She'd moved into town to try to get away from the shrine - and to try to get treatment for the illness that had tormented her for her whole life. The illness that makes her whole body ache like she had taken the physical pains of living without being able to heal, or perhaps absorbed the pain of others around her, and burned those pains into her every nerve.

When the illness flares up, it always brings the nightmares with it and Reika finds herself standing, walking, wandering her house aimlessly when she awakes. It hurts to walk, perhaps more than to lie down, but laying in bed just reminds her that the dreams will come again, and she is often too uncomfortable to sleep anyway. So she walks, and she wanders, aimlessly, her body howling in pain, but her mind entrenched in sorting out her dreams.

Sometimes, she wonders if that first death she sees is Kaname. She hasn't heard from him in a long time; he'd been one of her oldest friends, and a fling one cold, lonely winter when she was a teenager and they had both let their hormones control them, but he'd disappeared so quickly after that, and left a hole in her heart that ached almost as much as the illness...

 

* * *

 

Sakuya's dreams are perhaps the most frightening of all. She does not dream of death. She does not dream of blood. She dreams of nothing. Blissful, empty, nothing. She dreams of the moon, bright but empty above a forest. She dreams of flowers swaying silently in a breeze she can't feel. She dreams of a reflection of her own face on the glassy surface of a lake, distorted by small ripples that twist her visage, until she can't remember what she looks like at all anymore. Sometimes, she is in the hospital of her younger years, and people around her fall, clutching their faces, screaming in agony. She wants to care, but she can't care. They are of no concern to her. The only things that matter are the full moon shining above and drifting along with the gentle ebb and flow of thoughtless oblivion.

She sees her brother, her daughter, her father, and her best friend before her occasionally in the dreams, but she cannot recognize their faces, does not know their names. A part of her screams, fights, yells names at itself, but one moment there is memory and names and she knows, and the next there is nothing at all, the words become meaningless, and she moves on in that wonderful emptiness. There is no pain, no fear, there is nothing. There is only the sort of stillness, of nothingness, of final peace that only death can offer.

She wakes up crying silently, and there is always a full moon greeting her; often through the cracks in her drapes, but sometimes she awakes and she's somewhere else in the house. She's a sleepwalker, and has been since she was a child; ever since the accident that left her occasionally unable to form new memories. She has to mentally recount everyone's names and faces when she comes to: the piercing yellow eyes of her daughter Ayako, set in a face so like her own, twisted in a smirk of mischief, her brother Yuu's externally cold, calculating expression, but prone to becoming the same mischievous smirk as Ayako, her father's aging warmth, and her neighbor Misaki that Sakuya had all but adopted as a younger sister; the curious fawning the girl had learned to hide behind a veneer of disinterest as she had grown into a teenager. She has to remind herself that she will never forget a single one of them because she loves them and they are the most precious people in the world to her.

Sakuya peers through the curtains at the sky and wonders if she's been cursed by the moon, then has to discount those old superstitions in the span of the same breath. She's almost 40; she's getting too old to believe in curses.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, this might end up being more than just a one-shot, or it might end up spawning something else, because there is a... scene that is stuck in my head and won't leave that this could set up a good AU base for, but we shall see. (Also it feels sort of odd being back on the fic writing circuit, but there's gotta be a writing outlet somewhere, so there goes.)


End file.
